Shadowbun: Transformations
by BoneyM
Summary: After the Emergence devastated Zootopia, it's not quite so wonderful a place, and one rabbit needs to go a little bit further to prove herself in what passes for law enforcement.
1. Chapter 1

It had been a normal day - hanging out with Clawhauser at the reception desk and bitching about the corporate lifestyle - when something in her usual complaints about not being given the chance to measure up to the larger mammals in Knight Elephant and to show she was more than a PR stunt had caused him to look at her askance, then invited her to join him for a couple drinks after work. When she had shown up, half expecting to be hit on, he had taken her into a secluded corner booth and asked her her opinion on cybernetics. She had replied that the only thing keeping her from that option was that in KE, cybernetics came with a lot of fine print that locked you into a near-lifetime exclusive contract with them, as well as a repayment scheme that seemed design to keep someone in permanent debt to the company. Then Clawhauser had told him her secret.

Before she had come to work at KE and gotten to know the lithe but lazy animal she knew as Clawhauser, he had apparently been so fat he was practically spherical - he had shown her some pictures on his commlink to prove it. When he had failed a physical and given a deadline to get in shape or be fired with cause and no references, he had gotten in touch with a friend of a friend of a friend and gotten a little off-the-books enhancement. She had listened with mounting horror as he described the large, slug-like creature that had been designed and grown to his specifications and implanted in his stomach, that happily guzzled every scrap of food past a certain point to keep him able to keep to his current weight no matter how much he ate. Then, thankfully, he had gone on to describe a much less disgusting procedure - an increase in the strength and flexibility in his diaphragm, which increased the tidal volume of his lungs threefold. In this way he had eliminated his problems with running out of breath when forced to run, and was then able to pass that portion of his physical.

"It also came in handy in other areas," he had said with a waggle of his eyebrows, and Judy had rolled her eyes with a tolerant smile.

So she had called the commlink number he had given her, and now found herself loitering by the edge of a busy road on the first day of the week off she had taken, trying not to look suspicious.

* * *

Judy jumped in, and the van's side door slammed shut behind her as it drove back into the busy morning traffic, all outside sounds blocked out in an instant after the door latched closed. She grasped the door's handle for balance as she got her bearings, taking in the sight before her.

She had expected blood and rusty tools, perhaps even a dangling, flickering fluorescent light. But the setting before her looked very far from the stereotypical street doc's dodgy mobile operating theater she had imagined. The operating table was all gleaming steel, built to accommodate creatures much larger than herself, and innumerable dangling gadgets swayed gently above it from the van's motion. And sitting down in a comfortable straight-backed leather chair was the mammal she had spoken to over the phone: Dr Nicholas Wilde, Ph.D., D.A. (Hon), UDC. She had no idea what those letters meant, but it sounded impressive.

She had seen foxes before, of course, normally slinking around the edges of the Pupallup Barrens, constantly on edge and looking for an opportunity to dart forward and grab something or a reason to flee into the ruins. This fox was the complete opposite to that. Entirely at ease, and comfortably dressed in a loose palm-tree print t-shirt, he looked almost civilized. If she passed him on the street, it would barely even occur to her to demand his SIN and pat him down for contraband.

"Officer Hopps, I presume? Please, take a seat."

Behind her, a fold-out seat had emerged from the wall. She gingerly lowered herself into it. "Um, yes, Doctor. I spoke to you on the phone?"

"Please, call me Nick. And yes, you were looking for an edge over your colleagues."

"I don't want an edge, exactly, I just- well-"

"No need to explain. I bet it would be tough enough to be a bunny cop before metatypes and mages unbalanced things further. I take it you're entirely standard, then?"

"Yes. Complete pre-emergence typical." She tried, and failed, to keep the bitterness out of her voice, as she had a hundred times before.

"Well, we can change the 'typical' part, I think." Nick handed her a small handheld device that was projecting a holographic catalog. "You probably already have some idea what you want, but please take a moment to go through the options. Some of what we offer isn't available at your local While-U-Wait bionics kiosk."

Judy nodded and started to go through the pages, glancing at each of the options at first and then looking closer as she stopped being able to recognize the options. She had been thinking improved reflexes to increase her natural speed even further and maybe some cybereyes so she could run mammals' records without having to look away from them to consult a peripheral device, but some of these options made her practically salivate at the possibilities. An implanted taser so she could incapacitate with a touch? An implanted gland with some alterations to her mouth so she could exhale neuro-stun? An internal autoinjector so she could flood her system with combat drugs at a thought? Entirely new senses so she could see with thermal vision or radar or echolocation?

"Feel free to speak up if you have any questions," the fox said, shaking her out of her fascination.

She bit her lip as she flicked through the catalogue, practically drowning in options. "Do you have any recommendations?"

The fox cocked his head at her, a distant look crossing his eye for a moment before he answered. "Most of our customers have a demand for very short bursts of violence, but I get the feeling that you would require something a bit more prolonged." He waved his paw in a complicated gesture, and the catalogue rearranged itself. "The first priority would be reaction times. By adding a series of implants throughout your nervous system we can effectively increase your speed twofold with the base model, as well as increasing your reaction times." She eyed the entry in the catalogue thoughtfully, concealing her wince at the cost.

"Second priority would normally be for something to help you withstand damage - orthoskin or bone lacing or similar - but with your size, physics is your enemy. No matter what we add to you, you don't have the mass to take a hit from some of the creatures out there. So we need to consider how to avoid you getting hit in the first place. For that, you need to be able to spot threats before they become threats. A radar sensor implanted in your cranium, projecting ultrawideband and terahertz radar in short stepped-frequency pulses, would allow you to detect cyberware and weapons on mammals from up to fifteen meters, as well as giving you the ability to map your surroundings even through walls - useful for a patrolling officer that may find themselves in unfamiliar surrounds, don't you think?" She nodded, watching the little demonstration that played on the catalogue. Walls rendered transparent, concealed weapons visible as darker blotches on someone's silhouette, all overlaid on top of normal vision.

"Third, now that you can react quickly to danger you can spot, is to deal with that danger. As a rabbit I've no doubt you're already fairly agile, but if you can increase that you can improve both your ranged and hand-to-hand combat abilities, as well as your ability to avoid danger." Two implants, side-by-side, appeared at the bottom of the catalogue. "The first possibility is the cheaper of the two, but most balk at it - understandably so, in my opinion. By replacing every single muscle in your body with synthetic replacements, we can increase your strength and agility for a reasonable price. But it is very invasive. The other option is to incorporate vat-grown biological fibers into your existing muscle tissue, thereby increasing your muscle tension and flexibility. From the biometric stats you sent us, the base model would increase your current agility by 20%. It is also compatible with similar treatments to increase strength in the future, if you'd be interested."

Judy bit her lip thoughtfully, doing some mental arithmetic. She could afford maybe two of those options without trouble, but all three would be a problem. "Are there cheaper options that have the same effect?"

Nick shook his head. "I'm sure, officer, that you aren't suggesting that law-abiding citizens such as myself would deal in second-hand cybernetics." Judy winced. She was sure that he did, but she was equally sure he would never admit it to a KE officer he had only just met. "However, I think we can work on a discount if you'd be willing to make a few concessions." The fox's eyes gleamed, and for the first time Judy felt truly nervous about this. "A friend in Knight Elephant is a useful friend to have, after all. And if you'd be willing to moonlight with some little jobs here and there in your off hours, your existing expertise and these mods could let you erode your debt very quickly indeed." With another wave of his paw, the holographic catalogue she was 'holding' shimmered, and the prices were knocked down significantly to what must have been nearly cost.

Judy considered for a long moment, and the silence stretched between them. She had crunched the numbers a dozen times, and between her current savings, the line of credit she could take from her bank, and her future paychecks, she could just about afford some of the cheaper mods without putting herself in dangerous levels of debt. She had toyed with the idea of gambling on putting herself as deep in debt as possible and hoping that the more advanced mods would let her earn bonuses or promotions at work and thus pull herself out of financial danger, but had written it off as too risky. But if she took this fox's offer, she could afford all of those mods, plus a few others, with her existing funds and just a small line of credit.

It was dangerous, of course. To put herself in the debt of this unknown fox was a risk. But then again, to move to Zootopia in the first place was a risk. She could have just stayed at home and eked a living out of the soil like the rest of her family. But she had set her sights higher, and she wasn't about to back down now.

"I accept your offer. But if you'll return the catalogue to standard, I have a few other additions I'd like you to make..."

* * *

After the bunny had made up her mind, Nick had handed her a celebratory glass of champagne and told her it was spiked with general aesthetic to put her out for the operation. She had taken a deep breath, raised the glass in a toast to him, and drunk the entire glass in a single gulp. Moments later, she was sprawled out on the chair, the glass falling to the floor of the van where Nick scooped it up and tucked it back away in the drinks compartment.

"And she's out. You there, Honey?"

A slightly distorted voice sounded from a speaker mounted above the table. "Always, Nick. That word-a-day calendar must be paying off for you, you barely sounded like yourself there."

"Well, these corporate types expect some fancy talker as the doc. Gotta play into their expectations. Thanks for sending me the data to give her, by the way." He took the rabbit in his arms and lifted her onto the table, where the remote-controlled mechanical arms had unfolded themselves and had started to flex their 'hands' expectantly. "If they learned I was just the nurse and the actual doctor was a rigger working out of a Pupallup bunker, they'd be a lot less willing to do business."

"SINners." The voice scoffed, and Nick nodded in agreement before turning towards the driver.

"Finnick, take us by our supplier in Leverett. This bunny has exotic tastes, and we don't have some of this stuff in stock."

"Sure thing, Nick."

"Alright." Nick leaned over the unconscious rabbit and started to undo the buttons on her shirt. "Let's make us a superbunny. If all goes well, she might end up our hitter, so let's not fuck this up."


	2. Chapter 2

Some part of her always knew that performance alone was not enough to succeed in the modern world of business. Cronyism, networking, and ability to play 'the game' of manipulating performance metrics was how a mammal found success in a AAA corp, not actually being good at the actual job.

But it still broke her heart to see her vastly improved performance be ignored.

She had had such high hopes a month ago. After a few days to heal, the fox doctor had sent her the activation code for the implants spread throughout her nervous system, and she had quickly learned to use this new extension of herself to speed up her reaction times. The new additions to her muscles, after they had stopped aching, had already proven themselves by her smashing her previous best score at the shooting range.

The radar was a lot tougher for her to get used to. It was spliced directly into her optic nerves, so when it was enabled it could act as an artificial overlay onto her sense of sight or even entirely replace it, which was very confusing at first. She still hadn't been able to use it as anything more useful than a hands-free milliwave scanner without becoming disoriented, but she was getting better at it, and she could see the potential usefulness in it that had caused the doctor had recommended it to her.

(She had also tested her other additions, and found them to be working as intended. She had hoped she'd never have to use them for real, because she definitely didn't have a license for them and they couldn't be explained away as the result of practice or hunches.)

But it was all for nought. Her improved range scores, her shattering the record for contraband found in a shift, her putting half a magazine of gel rounds into the chest of a would-be assassin who had managed to sneak a ceramic gun through the metal detectors only to be taken down by Judy's new sense? Her reward had been to be told by the department beancounter that she was on course for a 'meets expectations' end-of-year raise of 1.2%.

So when the doctor had gotten in touch and hinted that he had an opportunity for her to make back her investment, she was a lot more open to it than she thought she would have been.

* * *

Pupallup was not a good neighborhood. It wasn't even a bad neighborhood. It was a disaster zone that Zootopia had screened off and made every attempt to forget about. Roughly centered on what was once the border between the pre-Crash districts of Tundratown and Savanna Central, the warren of malfunctioning climate controllers and forgotten power plants turned the place into a deathtrap of temperature extremes, radiation, and rogue mutants. And the fact that no law enforcer would go in there if they had any choice in the matter made it a natural home for criminals, lunatics, anarchists, and - unfortunately - anyone too poor to live in a more civilized suburb.

The borders of Pupallup, however, were a no-mammals-land of bars, pubs, and clubs, sheltering in the umbrella of lawlessness that Pupallup provided without getting too close to the death zone in it's heart. No corporate or civil authority claimed the area, so the vacuum was filled with various criminal organizations. Street gangs, thrill gangs, go-gangs, wiz-gangs, and even the occasional almost respectable international criminal syndicate. And now she was about to go into a bar in this black hole of depravity.

She pushed her way through the door and failed to resist the urge to pause and gawk. The first impression that hit her was a wall of sound that was almost a physical blow, a blend of shouting voices and some sort of music being perpetrated by a live band in the corner, protected from thrown bottles by a chicken-wire screen. The crowd was thick and loud and simmered with potential violence. Trying not to make even more of a spectacle of herself, she shook off her shock and made her way through the crowd, attracting her share of suspicious glares and then some before she reached the bar. Almost yelling to make herself heard, when she said the name 'Wilde' the barmaid - some sort of ungulate, but tattooed, dyed and muscled up to the point that she didn't have any idea what - pointed her towards a side door.

When she pushed her way through, the door swung shut behind her and cut off the sound in an instant, leaving silence in it's wake. No, not silence - the almost silence of a white-noise generator deadening incoming sound. The room was a storage cupboard, piled to the roof with pallets of bottles, cans, and kegs. In one corner, a pallet of beer cans had been pulled apart and restacked to make furniture, and the doctor - Nicholas, she remembered - was reclining on a seat made of boxes, with another, much smaller fox sitting next to him. On top of the makeshift table in front of them, a commlink was projecting a monochrome, static-filled hologram of some sort of mohawked badger's face.

"Officer Hopps! Pull up a box of shitty beer. Mi storage closet es su storage closet." The doctor waved her in, and she took her seat on one of the boxes that had apparently been set up especially for her. "This is Finnick. He's not a dwarf, before you ask, he's a Fennec fox." The small fox gave her a grudging nod and took a pull from the beer he had apparently clawed out of his seat. "He's our wheelman and grifter. This lovely lady," he indicated the hologram on the table, "is Honey. She telecommutes. She's our hacker." The badger gave her a suspicious glare, but nodded in greeting to her anyway.

"Um. Nice to meet all of you." She gave a shy little smile and wave.

"Gotta admit, officer, I thought I'd have to fight a bit more to get you down here. Meles Macrotechnology not recognizing your newly improved talents?"

Her smile turned into a grimace instantly. It was bad enough to have her illusions shattered, but to have it be so obvious stung. "Quite the opposite," she said, her tone thick with sarcasm. "I've been informed that if I continue my current rate of improvement I'll merit a 'meets expectations' in my end-of-year-review."

"Ha!" The badger barked. "That's the megacorps for you in a goddamn nutshell. It's so cute to see some wage slave have the truth dawn on them when they're already ass-deep in that nest of snakes."

"Be nice, Honey. Not everyone can have the same insight as you." Nick turned back to her. "Yeah, you'll quickly find that Knight Elephant isn't that great at recognizing and cultivating talent. Our little band of misfits and renegades, on the other hand? You join in our reindeer games, we'll cut you in for a flat quarter of the profits."

"The profits of what, exactly?" She took the beer that Finnick had torn out of his seat and handed to her, taking a swig and grimacing at the taste.

"Honey?" The holographic face of the badger dissolved, being replaced with an overhead map of Zootopia. "Thank you. I take it you're familiar with the Horns?"

"Sheep supremacist go-gang. They're big on cyber and bioware as well as all kinds of combat drugs. Their favourite party trick is for some pledge to get messed up on a cocktail of cram, jazz and nitro, and ram one of those heavy bikes they like into a storefront for the rest of the sheep to raid."

"Fun bunch, right? Anyway, according to my source, in two days they're moving something from outside the city to Downtown, and they're avoiding all the sensible routes." The map of Zootopia shimmered, and a path through it was highlighted in red. Sure enough, it avoided every suburb Judy would have felt safe in without significant backup. "So whatever they're moving is either really expensive or really illegal, probably both. It also means that if someone was to jack it, they'd only have the gang to worry about and not the authorites." Nick smirked up at Judy. "Not a crime to steal from a criminal, is it?"

"Not if they're SINless and it takes place outside either AAA land or a registered civil suburb." Judy recited automatically. "So if we hit them either before they hit the city limits or in one of the dead zones, they'd have no recourse."

"Exactly. And while I wouldn't exactly be happy if this delightful bunch were out for my blood, if we do it right they won't know it was us and they don't exactly have the brains or the contacts to crack the case."

Judy bit her lip thoughtfully, staring at the route map. She brought up her commlink and flicked through her recent messages until she found the KE memo she was looking for. "I thought so. This part of Penton," she indicated part of it near the border of downtown, "has been dropped from KE coverage because the local council is in talks to farm out security to some other AAA. That's probably why the Horns are going through it. But what they probably don't know is that the Disassemblers have been moving in in force in the last couple of days." That news got twin grimaces from the two foxes. "Yes, I know, but if we hit them here and keep moving, the Horns won't be able to coordinate a response because the Disassemblers would swoop in and confuse the hell out of the issue. They've been opening chop shops recently, so they wouldn't just be after the bodies, they'd leap at a chance to get their hands on Horns superbikes."

Nick looked impressed. "You always this quick a planner, officer?"

Judy shook her head. "I got most of the idea from our SOP when operating in Disassembler territory - if violence breaks out, reinforcements go in immediately, because if you give the Disassemblers half a chance they'll jump in to pick off any stragglers and take away the bodies."

"Well, as long as we don't end up the stragglers, that could work out nicely for us." Nick stared at the map thoughtfully. "I was going to suggest hitting them in the run-down parts of the docks for the security holes there, but your idea works better, Judy. Well done." Judy struggled to keep a hold of herself and not beam at the praise. She sure didn't get any from her day job. "You get all that, Honey?"

"Sure did, Nick, and my sources back part of her story up - KE has pulled out of that area, and the Disassemblers have been quieter Downtown recently."

"Alright. Finnick, you and Honey work together on finding a disposable van for the job, and then scout the area - carefully, in VR if Honey can find a feed - to find a good ambush site. Judy, do you have an unregistered firearm?"

"Of course not!"

"Then it's time to go shopping."


	3. Chapter 3

For the fourth time in as many minutes, Judy ran her paws over the Meles Alpha Nick had bought for her, checking the safety and fire selector. While it wasn't the fanciest or hardest-hitting or most accurate of assault rifles, it was covered by her KE license and between the built-in recoil compensation and the modifications it had come with, she could keep the recoil completely under control for anything short of a fully-automatic fire. It even came with a built-in grenade launcher, theoretically intended to be used with flashbangs and smoke grenades. She itched to pull it apart and improve it further, but there just wasn't time.

The munitions he had supplied, in contrast, mostly wasn't covered by her KE license. The magazine full of stick-n-shock rounds was - she was familiar with them from work, although they had switched to gel rounds since the troublemakers had learned to wear nonconductive body armour - but the rest? One one hand, a full magazine of depleted uranium SLAP rounds, the sort used to shoot down combat drones and light helicopters, and theoretically able to punch through goblinized sheep and their body armour as easily as it would their bikes. And on the other, a set of three high-explosive minigrenades. She wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of killing a mammal, but if the Horns forced her paw, she'd put them down.

She looked over to Finnick through the gloom of the stolen van, made worse by the cheap shades she was wearing. He was nursing a beer in one hand and a oneshot Alpacnology Striker in the other, a one-shot, shoulder-mounted missile launcher. "You don't talk much, do you?"

"Not outside my van or my pad," the little fox replied, his voice surprisingly deep and rich. "Pissed off a triple-A a few years back, and an ex sold her voicemail to them, so now they've got my voiceprint on file. I ever say a word where it could be recorded and the fuckers could find me." He looked Judy up and down with narrowed eyes. "And if Honey hadn't already checked you for a wire the moment you stepped into this van, I would've kept my mouth shut."

"Oh. I thought you just didn't like me."

"I don't. But don't take it personal. Only two mammals I do like, and you've met both of 'em."

Judy nodded in response, not sure what else to say, and silence fell between them again. She was on the verge of fondling her weapon a fifth time when a voice finally crackled in her ear. "Alright folks, it's just about showtime. Let's do the final go/no-go poll. Honey, you online?"

"Signals bounced, relay online, and all the cameras are functional."

"Whatever you say. Finnick, how's the van?"

"It's a piece of shit."

"But it's running?"

"Yeah, it'll drive. But if we end up with a tail I ain't gonna be able to shake them."

"Don't worry about that. Hopps, how about you?"

Her stomach lurched, but she managed to keep her voice steady. "Ready, Nick."

"Glad to hear it. Remember the plan and this'll go smooth. Remember, the package we're after is on the troll ram's bike - you'll know him when you see him."

Judy got to her feet, checking one last time that a round was chambered, flicking the safety to off, and putting her free hand on the handle of the back door of the van. Awakened by the safety coming off, the smartlink in the Meles Alpha connected with the interface in her sunglasses, and a crosshair appeared on the van door where the barrel of the gun was pointing. Finnick finished off his beer and followed suit, and there was a low hum as the warhead in the launcher came to life.

"Ten seconds."

Her heart was pounding in her chest and she felt like she was in serious danger of puking, but beyond all that she felt elated. No performance metric. No daily grind. No middle manager to take the credit. If she did her job here, she'd get the credit and an equal share of the prizes.

"Go!"

Judy swung the door open, and for a moment the dim light of a dreary morning seemed almost blinding, but thanks to the shades her vision adjusted quick. Next to her, Finnick had dropped to one knee and was taking aim. There was a tone, and he pulled the trigger, and very many things happened very, very quickly.

First, the rocket was launched free of the Striker, and a microsecond after it was clear the seeker warhead came online and took control of it's trajectory. Guided by a laser projected from one of the cameras Judy had set up around the area for Honey to operate, it quickly homed in on the lead bike in a phalanx of six that was roaring down the near-empty road. The lead bike was half again the size of all the others, as was it's rider, who had the enormous size, oversized horns and carnivore fangs of a troll ram.

The rocket struck at an angle, and instead of the explosion of a conventional payload, it delivered a massive electrical discharge, frying the control circuits of the motorbike before flowing into the rider. In an instant safety cutouts killed the engine, but it was too little, too late. With a heavily convulsing troll ram gripping the handles, there was no way that bike was going to coast to a smooth halt, and sure enough an instant later the bike tipped. And the moment the framework hit the asphalt, kinetic energy took over and sent the bike and rider spiraling through the air at over a hundred miles per hour.

As all that was happening, Judy had flipped the internal switch that activated the adrenal stimulators and neural boosters distributed throughout her nervous system and in an instant the world was running at half-speed. With an almost leisurely air, she leveled her assault rifle at the second bike in the phalanx and opened fire, wrestling with the gun's recoil as she sent a long burst of highly electrified adhesive rounds towards the sheep. Beside her, Finnick had dropped the launcher and was scrambling towards the controls, as they had planned.

The sheep response was quick, but uncoordinated. Two went down as they hit the brakes and threw their bikes into controlled skids, keeping the bikes between them and their attackers. One hit the accelerator and sped up even further towards Judy and Finnick. A fourth threw itself into a hairpin turn and disappeared down a side street.

The fifth ate asphalt as one of Judy's electrified bullets caught it in the face. Even if it hadn't dumped enough electricity into the ram to incapacitate it, the impact broke his jaw and would have been enough on its own to knock it out.

Judy leaped back as the sheep that was roaring towards her opened fire with a machine pistol, his aim bouncing wildly and a bullet ricocheting off the van door with a ping and a whine. The van rumbled to life as Finnick reached the controls, and just as Judy was bringing her gun back up her smartlinked glasses blipped and registered the sheep, which had been highlighted in threatening red, as the grey of a non-target. She wavered for an instant, but obeyed and swung her gun towards the two sheep that were hunkering down behind their bikes, and an instant later the speeding sheep was sent flying as his bike's anti-theft systems activated, the brakes slammed down and the handlebars locked in place. Unfortunately for the sheep, the tires failed before the brakes did, and the bang of an exploding tire added to the cacophony as the bike flipped forwards and sent him flying.

Judy made a mental note not to cross Honey, but swore as the two remaining sheep started opening fire on her as the van reversed up the street towards where the lead bike was still skidding along the asphalt. She fired another burst down the street and they ducked for cover again, but they wouldn't stay like that for long if they realized she was firing stick-n-shock. Just as the van reached the wreckage of the lead bike, one of the sheep started firing in earnest and a couple of bullets pinged off the side of the van.

"You deserve this for making me do this," some adrenaline-drunk part of her brain rationalized as she flipped the switch that enabled the grenade launcher built into her gun and the smartlink displayed an arc instead of a crosshair.

* * *

Nick let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding as a second grenade turned a second sheep into a second rapidly expanding cloud of gore and burning wool. He barely even heard Honey's cheers in his earpiece, and swiped the holographic feed away as she started running slow-mo replays. He took a sip of his drink, then looked in surprise at his shaking paw.

He had been concerned. He and Honey were both miles away and Finnick could take care of himself, but he had been worried about the naive little wannabe street sam that had wandered into their lives. That was unexpected. He stared out at the view from the balcony, the traffic of Seattle's Downtown faintly roaring far below him as the city started to wake.

"Nicholas. Nice to see you again. Didn't expect to meet you here, though." She leaned on the railing an arm's length away from next to him.

"Ms Johnson." He indicated the table behind him with a wave of his paw without turning, where a crystal decanter and a spare glass waited. "Feel free to help yourself to a drink."

"Never while working." Despite her words, she strode over to the table and poured herself a glass, her heels clicking on the wooden floor. She was wearing a sensible navy blue business suit, the knee-length skirt at odds with the pantsuits more often seen on high-up corporate types. "I take it you've come to a decision?"

"I have. I'll be taking the second option on this job. My team is picking up the package as we speak."

"Really?" She joined him again, her stance almost mirroring his own as she sipped at the drink. "I've never known you not to take the safer payday."

"Are you complaining?" He replied, harsher than he intended.

"Of course not. We'd be delighted to take delivery... once our agents let us know that the competition doesn't know who's responsible, of course. If all goes well, I'll contact you with the meeting spot within a few days. A week at the outside."

"That wasn't the deal. Cash on delivery, that was it. Nothing about waiting around with our claws up our arses while you guarantee a clean break."

"Did you get that in writing?" Nick's narrowed eyes were all the answer she got, and she laughed softly. "Let me guess. You were planning on driving your team right to the meet with whoever you nabbed it from hot on their tails and dump the entire problem right into our laps. Why would we let you make that our problem when it could be your problem instead?" Nick opened his mouth to retort, but she cut him off. "You have our terms. Take it or leave it, and I really recommend you take it. That is not the sort of cargo you want to be left sitting on. You wouldn't like the sort of attention it would bring, and you always were unnaturally attached to your two little friends."

The implied threat burrowed into his brain, and without conscious thought Nick turned and hurled the glass at her, and for the second time her laughter rang in his ears as the glass passed straight through her. "Temper, temper." She drained the drink, then let her glass fall off the edge of the balcony. "We'll be in touch."

Nick reached up and swiped angrily at his temple, and in an instant the balcony disappeared, replaced with the dim, dank shithole apartment he and Finnick called home. He dropped the VR electrodes onto the table and collapsed into a chair, staring blankly across the apartment at the shards of broken glass now scattered across the floor.

Well, fuck.


	4. Chapter 4

Judy and Finnick had made a clean getaway after the final two sheep had been put down. She had hopped out of the van, cut the saddlebags free of the lead bike that Finnick's rocket had disabled so thoroughly, and been back inside and closing the doors an instant before Finnick pushed the shitty van's shitty engine to it's limits in their escape from the area. It wasn't the authorities they had to worry about - it was the vultures. Sure enough, as they left Honey spliced the camera feeds onto Judy's sunglasses, and within a couple minutes a pick-up truck full of large mammals wearing the blue and green of the Disassemblers had pulled up. Judy felt vaguely uncomfortable as one of them put a bullet into the ram she had electrified with her stick-n-shock rounds, who had just gotten back to his hooves and was reaching for a holstered sidearm. Then the feed cut off as the self-destruct mechanisms in the cameras were activated, frying the circuitry with a burst of electricity and then setting off small thermite charges to melt what was left to slag.

With her adrenal stimulators deactivated, she collapsed against the side of the van and hugged herself as the post-adrenaline shakes hit and the world sped back up to normal speed, which felt dizzyingly fast. By the time the van came to a halt about ten minutes later, she had mostly collected herself and was on her feet and holding her gun when Finnick climbed out the driver's side door and pulled the side door open. That he waited for her to clamber out (after peering nervously about for anyone who could witness a heavily-armed rabbit climbing out of a bullet-perforated van) and into the mostly-abandoned multilevel parking lot before he pulled out a spray bottle and started misting the interior was probably a sign of his approval. She opened her mouth to ask what he was up to, then remembered his reticence about talking in public and decided it could wait.

After he had finished spraying down the entire van, front and back, he opened the boot of the only other car on the level, then opened the spare tire compartment and pulled out what was definitely a bomb. He set it up in the back of the van, set the timer for three minutes, shut the side door and indicated for Judy to follow her, which she was only too happy to do to get away from the literal ticking time bomb. They clambered into the car and Finnick drove them out of the place.

"C-squared," he said unprompted as they pulled into traffic. "Unravels DNA. Probably overkill on top of the bomb, but better not to take chances." He glanced at Judy who was watching the clock with anticipation. "Don't be expecting a boom, either. Incendiary. Honey killed the fire alarms in that level, too. It'll burn the van down to the skeleton long before anyone stumbles across it."

"Oh. That's clever."

"Don't live long in this line of work if you ain't clever," Finnick agreed. He gave her another sideways look, longer this time. "You did good today. Better than I expected from a corp cop."

"Thanks." Judy didn't know what else to say. She was still trying to process what had happened. She had gone in expecting a nice neat surgical strike, but the second bullets were flying all conscious thought had disappeared and she had just started spraying, and when the non-lethal rounds proved insufficient she had switched to explosives with barely a second thought.

She kept waiting to feel the crushing sense of guilt, but it didn't appear. She felt faintly bad, but it was the sort of vague, unfocused guilty feeling she felt when watching documentaries about mutant Pupallup orphans or poultry factory farms. Bad enough that she'd wait for an ad to change the channel in good conscience, but not so bad that she'd actually do anything about it.

If Finnick saw anything odd in her curtness, he didn't say anything about it. They road in companionable silence back to where they had stashed Finnick's van, and then back to their bar that served as their meeting place.

* * *

In the morning hours, the bar was still open but mostly empty. The only patrons were either the hard-drinking types going for the marathon rather than the sprint and a few folks that had just come off the night shift and were putting a few away before heading home to bed. The bar staff didn't blink an eye as Finnick strode in like he owned the place and beelined right to the storage shed.

Nick and the holographic Honey were already waiting for them, and Nick was looking every inch the smooth, confident face. Once again Finnick's seat was raided for beers, and then he switched it out for another box since the top layer of beers had been depleted to the extent that it was no longer a suitable seat, and the saddlebags were placed onto the table next to Honey.

"Well done, guys. Couldn't have asked for a smoother job. Honey, I take it this is safe?"

"Scanned it for trackers or booby traps before the bike even hit the asphalt, Nick."

"That's why you're the best." He unzipped the saddlebags, and Finnick and Judy both leaned in to watch. One side filled the room with a potent, eye-watering smell when unzipped, and all three of them recoiled. "Ugh. Is that hurlg?" Nick reached in again, and fished out the top half of a shattered bottle. "Yep. All the subtlety of moonshine with none of the charm." Peering in, he saw something he must have liked enough to risk the broken glass, because he stuck his paw back in and after a moment fished out three transparent plastic bags in quick succession, each dripping with the soupy troll booze. The first was an enormous brick of tightly-bound white powder. The second, an equally large brick of little white tablets. And the third was slightly larger and filled with capsules.

Judy reached in and picked up the bag of capsules gingerly, trying not to get any of the hurlg on her. "I'd need a mass spec or some field testing kits to be sure, but I'm pretty sure these will turn out to be the three ingredients of Horns drug cocktails. Nitro, Cram, and yep, these ones even have the Lone Stag brand stamped on them. Jazz."

"Well, that's a nice little bonus and no mistake, but that doesn't justify the security. That's just a typical party for the Horns." Nick unzipped the other side of the saddlebags, and lifted out what he found inside - what looked like a plain, steel thermos. When he turned it over in his paws, they all saw the power socket in the base. And five more were inside the saddlebags.

Honey spoke up and said what they were all thinking. "Pretty sure I've seen this movie before. You open that container and some murderous alien blob spills out and eats you."

"Was more worried about bioweapons, Honey, but we're on more or less the same page here. You know a way to figure out what's in here safely?"

"I've got a contact in the U of Z's chemlab."

"That'll do." Nick eyed up the three bags, performing some mental calculations. "Well, I'll assume that whatever's in these canisters will pay off somehow, either by resale or blackmail, so let's split the take from these right off the bat. I know a guy that knows a guy so I can get a decent wholesale price for these." He took his commlink out and played with it for a little bit. "Doing some back-of-the-metaphorical-envelope calculations..." He punched a few more buttons, then took a pair of credsticks out of a pocket, handing one each to Judy and Finnick. "I've lowballed it a bit there, I'll send you two the rest once I've gotten a price from my guy." Judy barely heard him, having turned the credstick to look at the amount readout and frozen in place.

* * *

It had taken a while for Judy to recover from her shellshock at having three months' pay casually handed to her. But when Nick had mentioned that he knew a place where she could start spending her newfound wealth without raising eyebrows, she had recovered enough to make a note of it. But she didn't mention what had leaped to mind when she realized she had money to burn, thinking it would seem silly to the more experienced and world-weary shadowrunners she had fallen in with.

She was a farm girl, of course. Most rabbits were, even in this era of big cities. And that had meant a life of being constantly surrounded by fresh produce that, according to the contract signed between the Hopps family and whichever AAA corp had bought up the futures of the current crop a decade in advance, she could never legally taste - and there were always security drones hovering to guard the crop, in theory from fire or sabotage but in practice they worked just as well at foiling hungry bunny mouths.

There was a loophole. There always were, with corporations. Because the penalty rates for not meeting quotas was so ruinous, every farmer knew to underpromise and overdeliver instead of vice versa, so after every harvest the worst of the batch was picked out until the exact weight that had been promised was met, and the rejects were kept by the Hopps family. Of course, not a single scrap of the pilfered produce could ever leave the Hopps Farm, not when retrovirus-laced pesticides had stamped corporate trademarks into the junk DNA of every cell, so it couldn't be sold on the grey market. So all of it ended up on the plates of the Hopps kids, and the rich flavours of fresh produce were a treat, even through the bittering agents put in place to prevent exactly that.

As a child, she had thought those scraps of stunted and misshapen fruits made artificially bitter were the greatest taste the world could possibly hold. As an adult, she theoretically knew that there was better possible, but still those early memories were the highest point of her gastronomic experiences. As a Knight Elephant officer, the best she could hope for was soy pretending not to be soy. More typically, she ate algae bars and KE-supplied dietary supplements.

So when she found herself flush with cash, her first instinct had been to reclaim the diet of her youth. And when she had managed to find the 'swap meet' that Nick had told her about and talked her way past the doorman, she quickly found her opportunity.

There had been a car accident somewhere in some corporate quarter, the weasel who ran the tiny stand had told her cagily, and some lucky chummer who was cruising the area with a fake ID had been in just the right place to dive in, grab what he could, and run. And what he grabbed had been a punnet of strawberries. Strawberries that hadn't been selectively bred to be incredibly huge at the expense of taste, or engineered so it could withstand any weather conditions up to a blizzard. Just regular strawberries, juicy and red and small.

The single strawberry she had bought had cost her. If she had tried to buy it on her KE salary, it would have consumed so much of her budget that she would be choosing between power, water, or air filtration come the next billing cycle. But with her newfoud wealth? It was an indulgence, but it barely made a dent. She had made other purchases, but in a hurried daze, consumed with the thought of the tiny fruit in it's protective wrapping in her pocket.

She was now tucked away in her tiny shoebox apartment, having double-checked the doors were locked, staring at the plate now containing the single strawberry. She took a deep breath, lifted it in both hands, and slowly and gently sank her teeth into it.

And froze. As her teeth had penetrated the skin and started to dig into the flesh of the strawberry, a single bead of juice had welled up, rolled down the strawberry, and impacted her tongue where it was pressed lightly against the strawberry. And everything changed for her.

She had tasted more intense flavours. Every Stuffer Shack offered an entire range of candies and sodas scientifically designed to hit the maximum amount of taste buds. But every flavour she had ever enjoyed in her life had been laden with a blatantly artificial quality that she had never noticed due to it's ubiquity, but now that she had something to compare it to, she knew she would never fail to notice it again.

She forced herself to continue with the motion. To sink her teeth all the way into the soft, yielding flesh of the fruit. Even as more beads of the entirely new type of flavour hit her tongue, she persevered, until she had finally managed to shave off a fragment of fruit, and with a titanic effort of will, she used her tongue to move it into place between her teeth so she could chew it.

The strawberry was... it was just delicious. In a world where everything was NEW and IMPROVED and EXTREME, it was just delicious. It wasn't a FLAVOUR SENSATION IN HER ORIFICES. It didn't come with a marketing campaign. It didn't promise sexual satisfaction and improved popularity. Delicious was all it was. And because it was not trying to be anything but that, it's purity of purpose changed everything she thought she knew about flavour.

In that moment, she knew she was lost. She had previously thought her life had purpose and meaning. But now she truly had a reason to exist: to acquire and consume more fresh, untainted produce. Morality, ethics, common deceny, common sense - none of these would get in the way of her quest.

In the years to come, she would think back to that melodramatic moment and roll her eyes at herself, but some part of her would wonder if she had really overstated things.


	5. Chapter 5

In an empty room of an empty wing of an empty campus, a mechanical arm in a very thoroughly sealed chamber reached in and gently unscrewed the steel cap of a worryingly plain thermos. After a pause, during which whatever had been expected to happen completely failed to happen, the hand lifted the base of the thermos and tipped it slowly up. One by one, small transparent ampules rolled out, filled with a deep blue liquid.

In his apartment, Nick snorted at the camera feed from the lab. "So much for the blob, Honey."

"Well, your guess could still be right, so let's not celebrate too early. The temperature hasn't changed in there, so the containers weren't really refrigerated. Maybe it's what the creators had on hand, maybe it was to discourage the Horns from snooping." The mechanical hands picked up one of the ampules. "Plastic, not glass. I could get a syringe through it and reseal it with fire."

"Do it. I want to know what we're dealing with here." Though he kept his tone light, in the privacy of his apartment he didn't have to keep the scowl off his face. If they were going to fuck around with him, well, he could fuck around right back.

He brooded as he watched Honey remotely perform the procedure, and then as the syringe distributed samples to a dozen slides. One went over to a microscope, and the microscope's feed was added on to his camera feed. Then the mass spectrometer's readout was added next to that. After a half-dozen different machines had added their feedback to his screen, he had had to expand the projected feed to cover an entire wall to make sense of any of it. Not that he could, of course. Honey always gave him more credit that he deserved when it came to these things.

"Shit! No, no, it's fine, I got it."

Nick jerked out of his seat. "Honey, what is it?"

"The fucking DNA reader almost sent out an alarm. Whatever this is, something in the machine sure as shit didn't like it."

"What, do colleges stop students from brewing up designer drugs in the labs or something?"

"They sure as fuck don't, where do you think the good stuff comes from? No, only a very few things get that treatment. Nick, what the fuck have you gotten us into?"

In the corner of his eye, Nick noticed something get highlighted and walked over to peer at it, and instantly felt his blood run cold. Midnicampum holicithias. Night Howlers.

"Nick. Look at this." The genetic readout expanded to cover the entire screen, zooming in on a specific and relatively short segment that even Nick could recognize.

"You stupid, arrogant sons of bitches." There, embedded in the genetic code of the severely illegal component, was a genetic trademark. The retrovirus-introduced chain of nucleobases that existed nowhere in nature.

"Alpacnology." Honey spat, disgusted. "It's always fucking Alpacnology."

* * *

Night Howlers were once considered a helpful plant for small-scale and organic farming, though mildly dangerous for the fits of violence it could cause if inadvertently eaten. Then it was weaponized, and it's legacy left cultural scars that may never heal.

Goblinization had occurred fifty years ago - the sudden and shocking transformation of a small minority of prey mammals into large, strong, carnivorous variants that would go on to be called orks, and an even smaller minority into even larger ones called trolls that, when it occurred to larger creatures like rhinos and elephants, created the largest, strongest mammals the world had ever seen. The governments at the times didn't react too badly, since preds were still preds, and they had already dealt with the small minority of pred children being born as prey in the form of elves and dwarfs. But a small minority of prey supremacists reacted very badly indeed. They saw goblinization as a betrayal of them by the victims, and a deliberate attempt to drive prey animals extinct by some unspecified cabal of pred magicians or scientists.

And almost twenty years after that, their plotting culminated in the surreptitious poisoning of many of these orks and trolls in coordinated, simultaneous attacks. The enormous, carnivorous former prey mammals went berserk, leading to dozens of casualties in the ensuing rampages. They then using their accumulated political influence to fan the flames, which lead directly to the largest riot in post-Awakening history: the Nighthowler Riot. Thousands of mammals died while Lone Stag, Zootopia's law enforcement of the time, did nothing. Things looked like they were spiraling out of control towards a level of anarchy and interspecies war not seen since pre-civilized times. Then, in a back-room deal between Zootopia's civil authority and Meles Macrotechnology, Zootopia was saved.

Citing breach of contract, Zootopia stripped Lone Stag of all authority as law enforcers, and put in their place Knight Elephant, who immediately deployed in force to quell the riots. They also seized all Lone Stag assets and premises, and quickly discovered the bodies of the metamammals that had gone berserk in their morgues, showing no signs of the autopsies Lone Stag had claimed to have performed. When they found a hitherto unknown drug in the bloodstreams of each of them, the plot came tumbling down.

Things weren't immediately peaceful once the truth was found, of course. Hate crimes and terrorist attacks continued. But once Lone Stag - or at least, the 'rogue elements' that Lone Stag proper immediately disavowed - had flipped on their true paymasters in the halls of government, and each of the plotters had been rooted out, all the way up to the Assistant Mayor, things got better, though they remain tense to the current day. The first two decades of relative harmony post-goblinization still seem to be a distant dream.

But one thing is for sure: Night Howlers became, overnight, the most thoroughly outlawed plant on the face of the planet. Apart from a few insanely high-security hydroponic grow-houses, every single one was believed to have been wiped out in a fifteen-year campaign. There weren't supposed to be any left.

And that wasn't even the worst part. Through the ringing in his ears, Nick could hear Honey continuing to talk.

"That's why I was able to cut the alarm - the machine checked it three or four times trying to figure out if it was close enough to the banned substance. This isn't pure you-know-what. It's not just that they've cut the distilled extract, they've modified the fucking plant. They're refining evil, Nick."

Shit.

"And among whatever else they've mixed in, it's about half dimethyl sulfoxide. You know, the stuff they use in slap patches? The shit that started the Nighthowler Riots needed to be injected. This shit could be delivered with a water gun."

Shit, shit, shit.

* * *

"Honey?"

"Yeah?"

"You know how you normally bounce my signal like my life depends on it when I talk to my contacts?"

"Yeah..."

"This time, it really might. So if there's anything more you can do..."

Honey paused for a long time. "On it."

There was a long, long delay before she gave the all clear, then he punched in a number he wasn't supposed to have, and wasn't supposed to exist. A number from a forgotten era of voice-only communication.

A number from a former life.

The number rang for some time before it was picked up. "Yes?"

"Hello, Ms Johnson."

There was a long, startled pause. "I'd almost forgotten you had this number."

"I wouldn't use it lightly."

"If you're upset about..."

"Mom." That silenced her. "Do you remember how many times I've asked you to stop working for your current employers?"

"More times than I can count, though you've given up in recent years, thankfully."

"Well, just once more. Something came up in my recent job that reminded me of old times. Remember when we went out to the country when I was a kid?"

It was a long time before she replied. "Vividly."

"Remember what things were like then? The times we had, the things we went through? I guess my current job just reminds me of them. A lot." There was silence on the other end, but a silence full of someone bursting to ask questions they knew better than to ask. "Please, think it over."

Nick hung up the phone, then took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. "Honey?" No reply. "Honey, I know you always listen in on these calls."

To her credit, she didn't pretend to be abashed. "What was that about?"

"A warning without saying anything any other eavesdroppers would understand. Me and mom were poor as shit. No holidays, no trips for the weekend. The only time me and mom ever left Zootopia was when she got us out of there during the Night Howler riots." He sighed. "I don't think that she knew anything about the cargo. She and I have never seen eye to eye, but she can't have changed that much. But if she did... well, that's why I asked you to really bury the trail back to me."

"Shit, Nick. All this time, your bitch of a Johnson has been your mom?"

Nick smiled bitterly at the empty apartment. "Some people just can't cut the ol' apron strings, I guess."


	6. Chapter 6

In a shitty, run-down apartment complex only technically within the borders of civilization, a fox considered a syringe filled with a blue liquid.

He had taken every reasonable precaution. Every REASONABLE precaution. But this was not a reasonable situation. Without even trying he could think of a half-dozen ways that his team could have been tracked if ridiculous amounts of money and resources were thrown at the situation. And with the stakes of Alpacnology being revealed to have taken society's biggest taboo and made it worse? There was no length they wouldn't go to to solve the problem that Nick had inadvertently become.

And not just him. Honey - poor, broken recluse Honey, who had seen all of two mammals in person in the last decade. Her bunker would probably keep her safe for a day or two longer than the rest of them, but even her ingenuity and paranoia would shrivel before the full might of Alpacnology. Finnick, his best and closest friend. He had already lost the ability to speak in public to a corporate grudge, and now he was doomed to lose everything else. And Judy - poor, naive little Judy, that he had ensnared with his doctor act and discount augmentation and a desperate thirst for recognition.

Well. If they were going to fuck around with him and his, he could fuck around right back.

His free paw searched through the fur on his collarbone until he found what felt like a mole. With a firm grip, he pulled it right off, revealing an injection port. And with a great deal of care, he placed the syringe at the port and injected himself.

He waited, desperately searching his own mind for any trace of being lost in insanity. After a minute that felt like a lifetime, he relaxed.

* * *

If you had asked Nick a week ago whether he felt any sort of civic duty, he probably would have faked it long enough to scam you out of something. But to his surprise, when he weighed the possibilities, he found that he couldn't just try to walk away. Not to save his life. Not even to save his friends' lives.

So he committed quite possibly the most grievous sin of his life - he called Judy and Finnick, and asked them to come meet him.

* * *

Judy wrinkled her nose as she stepped into the apartment. It didn't smell bad, exactly, but the undertone of mold was oppressive. It just seemed like the kind of place that warranted a wrinkled nose. Pipes criss-crossed the room, water dripped from the ceiling, and there didn't appear to be any actual furniture apart from a table, a set of chairs, and a dresser. A pair of old, faded motivational posters amplified rather than detracted from the depressing vibe.

It was pretty much the opposite of what she had expected from Dr Nicholas' home.

At the table, Nick and Finnick sat, staring at five steel flasks broodingly. She was struck with a sense of foreboding. Something screamed at her to turn around and walk away and forget she had ever been anything but a good little salarymammal.

Against her better judgement, she entered the apartment, joined the two foxes at the table, and braced herself.

* * *

"So that's about the sum of it. And that's why we're meeting here. Because as of two minutes ago, an Alpacnology Guerrero hit squad pulled up outside of my apartment building."

Judy spoke up for the first time since Nick started talking. "So you don't actually live here?"

Nick looked hurt, and Finnick burst out laughing. "Shit, our place is sad but it's not THAT sad."

From the commlink on it's usual place on the table, a recording of the outside of Nick's apartment building popped up. Immediately obvious were the half-dozen alpacas storming out of an unmarked van and into the lobby, each one sporting either a mohawk or a single braid. Honey's voice rang out. "Guerreros. Alpacnology's elites. Though they recruit based on species and bloodline first instead of actual ability, so 'elite' might be an overstatement."

"At this point, they've got me. They might not have you two. So if you want to bail, now's the time. But you know what's at stake here - god only knows what those twisted fucks are up to with enhanced Night Howler that you could aerosolize, but my money is on nothing good. I couldn't walk away from that."

"Shit, I could," Finnick replied. "But we both know I couldn't walk away from you, my mammal." He held out his paw, and Nick bumped it with a smile. Then they both turned to Judy.

She thought of what she was going to say for a long moment. "I've got a lot of siblings. Rabbit, right? So my family's rolled the dice on goblinization a lot. So far, I've got eight ork siblings and two troll. I had nine ork siblings, but that last one killed himself over it. And from what I've heard - and maybe it's just the Meles Macrotechnology propaganda - things got a lot worse after the Night Howler conspiracy and Lone Stag's complicity. I couldn't walk away and let all that history repeat itself."

Nick graced her with a smile after that little speech, and to her surprise, so did Finnick. Then Nick turned to the commlink. "Honey?"

"Are you kidding? You two boys would be lost without me and you know it."

"We sure would. We're a team, then. So let's start planning."

* * *

There was a single power that could be trusted with the refined Night Howler solution - Meles Macrotechnology. Not necessarily because Meles was more moral than any other AAA corporation, although part of Judy wanted to make that case, but because they were supplying the security for the only legal Night Howler flowers in the world. Even if they were working on their own bioweapon based on it, that would just give them more reason to want to expose and shut down any other company that was trying to beat them to the punch, instead of being tempted to deliver it to their R&D labs and pretend to have never seen it.

Delivering the package to Meles would be the tricky part. They considered simply getting Judy to call for backup, but with Alpacnology almost certainly monitoring the airwaves, they would likely arrive before Knight Elephant would. And Honey had reported that the entire suburb was thick with surveillance drones - they'd likely not get more than a block before being seen. And she had managed to sneak in and out of one undetected and return with it's target - an ID photo of Nick, and a single blurry image of Judy and Finnick that, according to it's format, came from a pair of cybereyes - most likely from the Horns biker that had fled from the ambush.

Finnick raised the possibility of navigating through the Zootopian underground, a network of disused sewers, forgotten access tunnels and entire subterranean streets that had been mostly walled off and ignored by civilized society, but Nick was quick to point out that uncivilized society had very much taken advantage of it and the attempt would mean running the gauntlet of just about every criminal, ghoul, and overgrown mutant lizard in Zootopia. If there was anything that would be worse than Alpacnology, it would be that.

Very quickly, they were left with a single option - run for it. Drive with all speed towards Downtown, hope that KE picked up on the disturbance and interfered quickly, and if not, head straight to the Downtown KE headquarters and dare Alpacnology to follow.

Honey paved the way as best she could. She killed the cameras in the building's parking lot and stairs, and identified the least terrible car for a high-speed chase, hacked through it's security, and had it ready to go the moment they got downstairs. But the moment they left the building, it would be a matter of seconds before one of the surveillance drones recognized them.

"So we just fucking rabbit, then," Finnick spat, then winced. "Shit. Sorry, Judy."

"I think we're a bit past that now," Judy replied, checking her gun one last time. It was loaded with the final high-explosive grenade and the magazine of anti-vehicle rounds she hadn't ended up needing for the Horns ambush.

Nick was loading the five containers into a satchel - the sixth being hidden away at U of Z for a desperate last-ditch effort on Honey's part if all else failed - and once it was full, he passed it to Judy. "Sorry to weigh you down, but if all else fails, you're paws-down the most likely to be able to make it."

"And leave you?"

"Yeah. This is bigger than us, now." He grimaced. "I can't believe I just said that. What sort of asshole says that?" Judy chuckled slightly at that as they turned to the commlink to go over the route one last time. "Okay, through Pupallup - with the weather this shitty it'll be abandoned because nobody goes there unless the sun's had a good chance to chase all the ghouls back to their holes, but for us it's worth the risk. Then we've got no choice but to make a break for Downtown and hope to weave through traffic, and with Finnick at the wheel it might just be possible. If luck is with us, KE will notice sooner rather than later and step in, but if not we go right to their headquarters and knock on their front door, dragging the whole fucking Alpacnology Guerrero corps with us if we have to. Any questions? No? Good."

The three of them looked back and forth at each other, each of them taking deep breaths as they prepared to leave. Nobody seemed to be willing to make the first step towards the door. Then one of them - none were sure who - made the first step, and suddenly they were all leaving.

* * *

Sure enough, mere seconds after their car left the parking lot, Honey reported that an alert had gone through the surveillance drone network. Finnick gunned the car's engine and Judy turned in the back seat, aiming her Meles Alpha out the back window she had busted out in preparation for exactly that. A tense minute and a couple of false alarms as overly aggressive drivers almost got hosed down with military-grade anti-vehicle rounds, the first actual pursuer appeared behind them.

Judy took an extra second or two to be sure, but she quickly recognized the vehicle's colour scheme. Lone fucking Stag. All reservations evaporating in a second, Judy opened fire. A half dozen rounds to the engine block later, smoke had started pouring out and the car screeched to a halt, and Judy had a moment to feel proud of herself before a second pursuit vehicle appeared. And then a third.

Judy groaned to herself as she tried to take aim at the cars as they weaved in and out of the morning traffic, taking a shot here and there when she could, but both of them refused to make the first mistake as the first and give her a clear shot. "Finnick, we need to clear this crowd!"

"Doing my best." Their car screeched into a hard turn and sped up as they charged down the final stretch to the Pupallup barrens. As the foremost pursuit vehicle reached the corner, Judy got a clear shot into it's side and took it, stitching a long burst along it's side and it failed to complete the turn, slamming straight into the side of a building on the other side of the T-junction. Judy wondered for half a second whether the driver had panicked and lost control or been hit, but couldn't speculate any further as the final pursuit car rounded the corner at a more extreme angle and managed to avoid Judy's firing arc. A moment later, however, safety mechanisms that were not supposed to be overridable were overridden, and the pursuit car's gearbox shifted from fifth to reverse, instantly turning a perfectly good gearbox into shrapnel and a pursuit vehicle into a write-off.

With that last intervention, Honey spoke up. "Sorry guys. I really am. But if I don't start a fighting retreat back to my primary proxy right now they're going to find my bunker in about thirty seconds, and once they do that they could cut me off entirely and I wouldn't be able to help you anyway."

"It's fine, Honey. You went above and beyond. And if none of us makes it out of here, it's going to be on you to try to get word out there."

"Guys..."

"We know, Hon."

"See you on the other side, Honey." Finnick's voice was uncharacteristically thick with emotion. An instant later, Honey's presence was gone.

"Well, fuck," Nick said, summing things up nicely.

Almost as if their adversary sensed that their digital guardian angel had retreated - and they probably did know, since it was their support hackers that had chased her off - the pursuit van that they had originally seen disgorging Guerreros into Nick's apartment building showed up behind them as they cleared the traffic and shot into the barrens. It's plain exterior evidently hid quite a lot, because it gained on them quickly, even as it weaved back and forth to avoid allowing Judy a clear shot. It sure didn't stop her from trying, but the bullets punched into where the engine block should have been to no effect, and the windscreen was slanted forward enough that her bullets left long, ugly gouges in the glass, but failed to penetrate. Judy tried to sneak a bullet through the thin border between the windscreen and the supposed engine compartment, but the combined motion of the two cars was enough to make it all but impossible, and her attempts chewed through the last of her magazine.

"Guys, I'm down to the grenade, and that fucking tank of a van is still coming!"

"Fuck," came the twin reply from both foxes. Nick continued, "do you think it'll do the job?"

"I'm pretty sure the engine is in the back, but I've fucked up the windshield pretty bad, a direct hit could shred the driver."

"Alright. Finnick, can you give her the shot?"

"You got it."

The car maintained speed and course as Judy took careful aim, wishing she had her smartlink glasses. The van, sensing weakness, accelerated, and in a perfect instant everything lined up and Judy fired the grenade. It flew a perfect course between the two vehicles and hit the windshield dead-on, in an instant the ensuing explosion turned the glass into a thousand deadly shards. The van continued forward but drifted off the road, almost steering into an abandoned mailbox before righting itself. As Judy watched, the driver's side door opened and the shredded, bloody mess that used to be the driver was shoved out as someone else took the driver's seat.

"We got one of them." Judy reported, her heart sinking.

"Just one?" Nick asked. There was a grim silence for a moment that delivered all the confirmation he needed. "Shit."

"Well, at least we made the fuckers bleed for it," was Finnick's contribution.

"Way to keep it positive, big guy."

In moments, the van had caught up to where it was before Judy's grenade had hit it, and with the windshield out of the way she could see one of the alpacas in the rear seats trying to line up a shot with a rifle. "I think I pissed them off, they're going to start shooting."

"How much of Pupallup do we have left, Finnick?"

"Too fucking much."

"Shit. Buckle up, Judy." Nick scanned the road ahead, and pointed to an abandoned office building up ahead. Finnick nodded, and as they passed it, he threw the car into a sharp corner and rammed right through the glass doors and through the lobby, and the car slammed through the reception desk, the wall behind it, and halfway into the far wall of the room beyond that.

* * *

It took a long moment for any of them to regather their thought after impact, though Nick did manage to shake it off long enough to turn in his seat and check the others were merely stunned. After another moment to catch their breaths, they managed to haul themselves out of the ruined car. A quick glance around the room they had penetrated proved that it had once been an office, but most of the furniture was long gone, with just a few rusting filing cabinets and some abandoned office chairs remaining.

Nick spoke up first. "The good news is that if they aren't already in, they aren't following us in right away," Nick reported. "Bad news is, it'd be because they're surrounding the building first. Judy, it's going to be on you to make the break for freedom. You remember that enhancement you almost talked yourself into getting?"

"Exhalation spray?"

"Yeah. You were talking about filling it with neurostun. Well, I'm loaded up with something a little more potent," he said, nodding towards the satchel on Judy's side. "This way me and Finnick can go out swinging, the way we deserve to, and give you a fighting chance to get clear of these alpaca bastards."

"You always were a fucking drama queen, Nick." Finnick's voice was fond, and lacked it's usual bite.

"Yeah, yeah. Kiss for daddy?" Nick asked, a sad little smirk on his face. Finnick rolled his eyes, but brought his face up to Nick's anyway. Nick delivered the promised kiss on the top of his head, then exhaled a faint blue mist over him. He immediately started to shake, and would have collapsed if Nick hadn't taken him into his arms. "Take care of Honey for us," he said to Judy, his eyes not leaving Finnick as he threw his commlink towards her, and then as he held a paw in front of his mouth, the same exhaled blue mist soaking his pawpad. The two of them collapsed backwards as the same fit of shakes enveloped Nick.

Having a terrible idea of what was coming, Judy snatched up Nick's commlink and fled.

* * *

Nick had been almost right. It had taken every ounce of her speed and agility and a little help from her radar sense on top of that to avoid the tightening noose of Alpacnology hit squads. But beyond that noose, there was another, larger noose. Rentacops.

Not just any rentacops. Lone Stag rentacops.

She may not be on Knight Elephant business right now, but there hadn't been a Lone Stag goon yet that was worth the dirt on the feet of the lowliest KE officer. And on top of a mighty desire to punch someone, she had one hidden advantage, the final additions she had paid Nick to install in her: lightning punches.

Well. Electroshock pads implanted in her knuckles. But Judy was entirely prepared to lightning punch anyone that disagreed with her naming choice.

So when she made it past the first block and found her way blocked by a trio of Lone Stag officers, instead of spending a single second looking for an alternate way around, she activated her nervous system augments and plowed right into them. The first never even realized she was there, as she sent the young, skinny tiger flying with a flying double kick to the head. The second, a wolf, was still reaching for his holster when an electrified punch to the gut put him down hard. And the final one, a stag, appropriately enough, managed to draw his sidearm, but to Judy's enhanced nervous system it seemed trivially easy to sidestep his aim as she watched him pull the trigger, and then deliver a series of incredibly satisfying lightning punches to his body.

Some of her emotions worked out by that scuffle, she resumed her running. The shot had almost certainly drawn attention, and not just from her current pursuers. But moments later, the first bursts of gunfire and distant screams behind her had begun as Nick and Finnick started buying her time to escape as she started the long sprint out of the barrens.

* * *

Her drive through the city was uneventful at first, once she had reached civilization, flagged down a car, flashed her badge, zapped the uncooperative driver and dragged him onto the street. Trying not to attract attention to maximize the lead that Nick and Finnick had given her, she followed every road rule, and had plenty of time while sitting in traffic and at red lights to observe the city's movements around her - as well as suffer through the comedown of her nervous system upgrades. At first, everything seemed normal. Then, off in the distance, sirens started - first one or two, then a cacophony as every independent security force in the city was drafted by Alpacnology in their desperation. Billboards that had been playing ads started to broadcast breaking news bulletins as talking heads tried to make sense of just about every private security firm in the city going berserk at once, and then the emergency broadcast system overlaid that with the Mayor appealing for calm. Several times security vehicles sped by with sirens blazing and she shrank down in her seat, but they weren't looking for vehicles stuck in traffic. They were looking for someone fleeing.

By the time she reached the borders of Downtown, the city was in an uproar, all because one rabbit had slipped the net. And it was about then that her luck had run out - since none of the rented security were stupid enough to try to challenge Knight Elephant in the heart of their power, they had accumulated around the borders of Downtown, and one of them saw her through the windshield and motioned for her to pull over - likely thinking it would be just another false alarm. He was immediately disabused of that notion when she floored it, and moments later two security vehicles were pursuing. She couldn't tell whether they were Lone Stag or some smaller and even more pathetic organization, but it hardly mattered at this point.

Whoever they were, they didn't have the confidence to catch up. Judy drove like a bunny with nothing left to lose, and her fresh set of pursuers would not or could not imitate her, and were unable to catch up through the thick Downtown traffic, even as more and more cars joined the pursuit. Only when she reached the park that the KE building's entrance fronted did she slow down, sounding her horn and giving the mammals before her a chance to scatter - and alerting every officer in the building that something was going on. By the time she pulled up outside the front entrance, a dozen Knight Elephant officers had already poured out of the building, and half of them had already drawn their guns.

She held her badge to the window, and knew that after an instant, the signal the badge gave when it detected her fingerprint had switched her from red to blue on a dozen smartlink interfaces, and breathed a sigh of relief as the guns that had begun pointing at her immediately switched to her pursuers, who were just starting to realize how badly they had fucked up.

The coming hours would involve a lot of explaining, and yelling, and disbelief, but she had delivered the proof to the one place Alpacnology couldn't wrest it from. Nick and Finnick hadn't sacrificed themselves for nothing. She leaned back in her chair, all the energy suddenly gone out of her.

She had made it.


	7. Chapter 7

In the storage closet of a shitty bar on the borders of Pupallup, a single shadowrunner sat on a throne of boxes, nursing a shitty beer. She stared at nothing - or, to be more accurate, she stared at where something would be if the hologram of her commlink was to decide to display something. It was the same place she had stared, off and on, for weeks. She was getting to know the staff here on a first-name basis.

When the noise came, it was almost swallowed in the hollow roaring in her ears. Almost. "Yes, Honey?"

The commbead flickered into life, displaying snippets of social media. A private message here, an offhand mention there, a 'based on a true story, no really' creepypasta on the side. Collated from a dozen different sources, all from the last few weeks.

Feral foxes. Psycho fox mom and her kid. Unknown predator lurking in the sewers. 'The Legend of the Pupallup Foxes'. 'I can't believe a baby fox almost fucking ate me!'

"I fucking told you I'd find them."

For the first time in weeks, Judy smiled.


End file.
